Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Pilibhit: Gurmeet Singh remembers the call his wife Ramanjeet Kaur made a few days before she landed at the IGI airport in Delhi on October 16. "There's a problem with my visa," she had told him. "I will have to return to India. Please come to pick me up." Gurmeet, a resident of Pilibhit in UP, reached the airport hours before flight no 6E-22 from Dubai touched ground at about 3 am that day. But Ramanjeet, 25, never came out.
"I kept waiting and waiting," Gurmeet told TOI on Wednesday, on his way to Delhi for a second meeting with Union minister Maneka Gandhi, who has granted him a hearing.
Gurmeet, 28, a salesman at a private showroom in Pilibhit, said that when an Amritsar-based job placement agency told him and his wife that she could get a job as a waitress in Dubai, they were both happy.
Police, however, have a different version of what happened. IGI airport police told TOI that the woman was seen stepping out of the international terminal on October 16 after which she reached the domestic terminal using an internal transit route. From there she boarded a flight to Kolkata. All this while she was accompanied by a youth, cops said.
Delhi police also claimed that they showed CCTV footage of the whole thing to Gurmeet and that he even identified the man who was with his wife "as being from the same locality in Pilibhit". He was then advised to approach the Kolkata police to get more information.
Asked about it, Gurmeet said the airport police never showed him any CCTV footage. "How could I have identified the man if I wasn't shown anything," he said. "The IGI airport police don't want to help me. They are avoiding their responsibilities in tracing my wife."
Gurmeet added that it was unlikely she was having an extra-marital affair. "We were married very young and both of us were quite happy. If she wanted to leave me, she needn't have gone to the extent of taking up a job in Dubai and eloping from the international airport. The man seen with her could have threatened Ramanjeet and forced her to go with him. I, too, have been receiving calls from a mobile number in Dubai, asking me not to pursue the case. I even gave the number to the IGI airport police. I also have the number of the agency that sent my wife to Dubai."
22/11/18 Keshav Agrawal/Times of India